


A Work In Progress

by copacetic



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-26 17:49:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3859333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copacetic/pseuds/copacetic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jupiter deals with consequences. Some are better than others.</p><p>Maybe she will learn to make her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I really love aunts. I have more than one woman can reasonably handle, so I can sympathize.
> 
> Any Russian speakers, please tell me if I mistake something. I did a lot of research for this by googling 'Russian food' and I am happy to be corrected.

Jupiter has always liked sex. It's a nice way to end the evening, a nice way to smooth out a relationship until her attention starts to wander when they are talking. Eventually she stops texting them and blocks their number if they don't get it. Easier that way. 

She's always been so tired for so long, running on empty, it's next to impossible for her to remember to call that dude that she fucks sometimes. It turns out, there's always another dude. Somewhere. Jupiter has never had to go looking for long. Even though she's never been sure what she was looking for. 

With Caine, it's not nice. It's visceral and sharp, her fingers cramping with intensity. 

She doesn't think she likes nice any more. Maybe she never did. 

She never stops paying attention to him. He is always her focal point, always the one thing she can't tune out. And she doesn't like having sex with him. 

She loves it. 

 

His wings have a mind of their own. She loves stroking them, tracing the pinfeathers with her fingertips. They ruffle and stretch without him seemingly always being conscious of it. 

Caine drowses in his bed, naked and beautiful. She has a rare day off today, and she is planning on spending it with him. She doesn't want to leave his apartment- although flying would be fun. She'll have to ask him when he wakes up. 

She's been back on Earth for a few weeks. It still seems unreal, distant. Her usual life is so familiar and unchanged it makes her sick, sometimes. Shouldn't someone notice her tattoo? Her new poise? Something. It makes her want to scream. She has this huge secret, and nobody has divined it. Nobody has pushed their way past her not wanting to talk about it.

She wishes someone would. But Caine is a lovely distraction.

They've only had a few hours here and there together. Kisses in dark alleys, safely snugged up against him. 

Jupiter had pushed into his apartment this morning. He was staying in a tiny apartment in a huge building, gray and dull. She didn't care. They had fucked without even taking off their pants on the kitchen floor, then retreated to the bedroom. 

Caine isn't fully asleep, but close enough to let her pull his feathers between her fingers thoughtfully. He throws an arm around her naked waist and pulls her close, snuffling slightly as he settles his face on her shoulder. 

She still feels unsettled. She still doesn't know exactly what she wants. 

But just knows that whatever she wants will involve him. 

She slides a hand down his stomach. He murmurs pleasantly. She plays with him for a few moments, stroking him to hardness. His eyes slit open, evaluative. He sighs welcomingly, slides his legs further apart to allow her to touch deeper. 

She knows he likes it, he said as much earlier. Jupiter raises herself up, seats herself between his legs, her fingers probing and pushing on the outside of his hole as she sucks his cock in her mouth. He gasps, fingers wending through her hair.

Jupiter likes having him in her power, likes being in charge. She sucks firmly, her fingers pushing between his hole and balls, her other hand cupping his prick as it lengthens and fills in her mouth. Her tongue laps down the underside of his prick, her hands keeping the rhythm. 

Caine gasps again. She loves the way he sounds, loves his fingers in her hair. Desperate for her, desperate for what she can give. She smiles into the blowjob. 

Jupiter reaches over to the table beside the bed for condoms. With confident fingers she pinches the tip of the condom, rolls it down his cock. He looks wrecked, sweating and eager for it as she throws a leg over and settles herself to slide down his cock. 

It’s just a little too cold with the condom and the lube. She bites her lip, focusing to get through the shock. But soon she’s panting and eager for it again, her back bowing as she tries to get all of his cock inside her.

She swivels her hips, enjoying the breathy gasps Caine makes. His fingers tense on her hips. She knows that he likes it slow, so she goes a little faster, then slowing down at his noise of complaint. Jupiter gets his cock right where she likes it, little tight movements that stimulate her clit and fills her deliciously full. His hands are still on her hips, fingers flexing and curling. 

Jupiter reaches down and bites at his mouth as he comes gasping. She can feel the condom filling up, feel his cock jerking helplessly as he comes. She fucks him through it. Her orgasm is coming, relentlessly, little bursts of it in her lower abdomen as she milks him through it, until it reaches up to her stomach and down her legs, an unstoppable supernova. Her muscles tense and relax. She throws her head back, smiling, enjoying the feeling of being full and being fucked.

She treasures this small moment of peace, of pleasure. Who knows how long she will have this, she whispers to herself as she disposes of the condom, curls back up to Caine. He’s nearly asleep again. 

Why can’t she have this.


	2. An Aunt Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I owe a lot of the aunts and cousins to my own family, as well as P.G. Wodehouse.

No, but really- what is his sign? 

Her aunts are relentless. She resorts to increasingly outlandish reasons why he can't come over. 

"He's in the mob, and he's afraid of the rival gangsters."

Her aunts tell her that the mob they have in Chicago is nothing like the Russian mob, as always the Americans take second place, Jupiter you cannot date a coward. 

"Think of your Aunt Irina, she dated a coward and look at what happened to her." Aunt Nino says with a look of satisfaction on her face. 

In the ensuing argument that verges on a slap fight between Aunt Irina and her other aunts, Jupiter escapes one more dinner without having to say it. 

"He's vegetarian, he won't eat any food." She tries, at another dinner when they are looking at her expectantly. 

Aunt Agafya promises to cook him pirozhki, and maybe promises not to make rassolnik, but Jupiter was sure she had her hand behind her back so she couldn't see her crossed fingers. Kidneys are Aunt Agafya's favorite part, anyway. The noise Agafya makes when she slurps them up, Jupiter is afraid to say, haunts her sometimes when she's trying to go to sleep.

Uncle Vasily inquires after her young man's sanity if he doesn't eat bacon. His main arguments are that it is tasty, crispy, crunchy, and Agafya can fry other things in the grease, so it is not wasteful like American cooking. "And Jupiter, if he does not like bacon-” here he gestures with a piece of it, to make his point- "He must be crazy, and I would not like you to date a crazy man, you are crazy enough without more." 

Here Aleksa comes to her daughter's defense, and the curses become quickly too high pitched for Vasily to escape easily. 

"I am sorry, you know, Jupiter." He says, conceding the point a little. He doesn't like it when the cops come for noise violations, either. "But still- no crazy man for you. Agafya will make him bacon, and he will like it." 

She manages to say something noncommittal and escapes again. But, another evening, another prolonged family discussion. 

"He works nights and weekends, he can't make it most of the times I ask him."

Here she's asked to reiterate that she has asked him, "Aunt Irina, I swear. I'm not hiding you, why would I try and avoid introducing him to you?"

Here her mother makes another spirited defense. Jupiter had told her that he works security at a hospital, caught out one night by her mother's gimlet stare. Caine had said it as a joke the night before and it was the only thing she could think of. Thankfully, it had worked, but she's now caught in increasingly fanciful lies. 

Her mother brings up his job. Unfortunately, also along with some allegations about Aunt Irina faithlessly drinking all the vodka when, instead, Aleksa and Nino had wanted to drink some (or all, Jupiter mentally translates), can't Irina appreciate that? 

"We work on our feet all day, the least you could do is not drink it all." Her mother concludes with eating a piece of kidney angrily. Nino glares at Irina from her side. 

Jupiter rather feels that this had answered her own (rhetorical?) question from earlier. She pretends not to hear the muttered imprecations her mother puts out while Irina responds to the central part of her argument, and then makes some elaborations of her own. Jupiter pretends to mistake her mother's angry wheezing for the teakettle and escapes to the kitchen. 

When Agafya says she'll make blini, though, Jupiter thinks she might as well tell them. 

She does want blini. Yevgeniy stole most of them last time. 

"He's a space alien, and I'm afraid you will make fun of his wings." 

The cackling that ensues does end up in a noise violation, but Uncle Vasily gets off with a warning this time and some nasty looks from his neighbors in the morning. 

She knows she's going to have to do it sooner or later. She's spending more time at his apartment, enough to think of it as hers too, and she knows she needs to introduce them. 

Jupiter tries just her mother and Aunt Nino first. It turns out to be a good decision. 

It's not a bad decision, at least. 

Well, she's made worse ones. 

 

Caine looks at her strangely when she frets about going out to meet her family. They are getting ready to leave the apartment, and she is worried. She's been suppressing it womanfully for days. She knows that her aunts will eat him alive and spit out his bones. She has no idea how she's going to explain- everything. 

Caine has been absolutely no help in avoiding the disaster. He hummed when she told him about it in a vaguely approving way, and then kissed her more than usual that night. 

Jupiter suspects he might be looking forward to it. She had caught him the next day with bags from sephora packed full of unusual colors of eyeliner. He told her that the ladies working there were very kind, and showed him some new ways of applying blush to really emphasize his cheekbones. Most damningly, she's also seen him reading instructions on how to interact with Tersies again. And practicing blush application, although that's a regular Saturday for him, so who knows. 

She put her foot down about the purple glitter eyeliner an hour before. He flattened his lips, but put it back in the makeup bag. He only has on a little mascara, and he thinks she didn't notice the blush. 

His cheekbones do look amazingly emphasized, though, so she had let it go. 

She honestly doesn't know what's going to happen. As far as she knows, he's been making all his grocery store runs at night. They haven't done much except have sex with each other in the apartment yet, and go on gravity surfing dates. She's not even sure how he got the apartment, or how he gets his money exchanged into American. 

But he has an apartment, and she really likes having sex with him in it, and she's taking him out to meet her aunt and mother, and yes she's freaking out a little. Why did she agree to this? 

"I know they fold down, and it maybe looks like a bulky jacket and you're just a Trekkie who really likes his ears- who wouldn't- enough to go to the grocery store wearing them. But this is my family, and we are kind of really into hugging, and I think my Aunt Nino would be a too little into hugging you to not. Notice. The giant wings!" She is waving her hands in frustration at his blank face. 

"You've seen interstellar space ships. And you think I can't disguise myself in the daytime without a hat, a big coat and the excuse that I'm a deeply weird person?" 

She waves again, weakly this time. "A creeper coat is going to stand out in this weather." 

He reaches behind his neck into his jacket collar. His wings are modestly tucked in under a suit jacket and a collared shirt with a soft pattern of pink squares. 

Caine had started out with a tie, but Jupiter had gotten them sidetracked after she saw him. They are now running late, and the tie is too wrinkly to wear. 

He pushes some kind of button hidden in his collar, and his outline fuzzes and redraws itself. His shoulders are smooth and too skinny without his wings. His ears round down, the tattoos and marks on his neck blurring and erasing. 

"Holy crap." Jupiter smiles. "Let's go." 

Caine almost smiles. She knows she saw it. 

 

Maybe she shouldn't have decided on a coffee date with her mom, aunt, and boyfriend. 

She should have at least picked a coffee shop that serves alcohol. They have those, right? She's going to start a chain and retire rich at the age of 35. 

As soon as she's done with the hell she's currently in. 

"I regret every decision I made that led me here." She tells her mostly empty coffee mug. It doesn't respond, much like Aleksa and Nino. She wants something alcoholic to drink. The coffee just makes her more awake. 

She knows the button down shirt was too much, too fast. At least she (accidentally) made him lose the tie. 

Aleksa and Nino are cooing over Caine. They've been nothing except kind, sweet, and loving. He's just finishing up a story about the likelihood of breaking a window with a walker and why the night shift nurses should never give geriatric patients Benadryl. 

Aunt Nino leans over and hisses in Russian, "What a sweet young man! Jupiter, you will have to learn to be a better cook, he looks like he eats a lot." She looks at Jupiter for a moment, and then amends, "Or at least learn how to cook." Jupiter whispers thanks, trying to die quietly. 

When Caine brings out his phone to show pictures of his 'niece', though? All bets are off. 

Jupiter is starting to worry that instead of her aunts not approving of her dating him, worse would be if they didn't approve of him dating her. 

The pictures on his phone must be from stock photos somewhere. She really regrets showing him how to google. 

She only picks up on the occasional word- tutu, penguins, and tea party- when they are talking about his 'niece.'

She is swirling around the remnants of her coffee and wondering who would get the most aunts in the divorce, and how she could rig it, when she realizes they are looking at her expectantly. "Yes?" She says blankly. 

Aleksa makes that restrained hissing noise that Jupiter recognizes as slightly annoyed laughter. "We want to know if you would like to go to the zoo with Caine and Rose and your cousins this summer?" 

Jupiter doesn't see any immediate harm in saying yes. She can always fake a slightly broken arm later, anyway. 

She should have recognized the danger of Aleksa mentioning the cousins and Caine in the same sentence. But that's the beauty of looking backward- you can clearly see what you're going to get. 

 

While Jupiter can mostly handle her aunts, her cousins deserve a stiff drink or six. She has a battalion of aunts, yes, but a legion of cousins. The aunts that have children mostly live in the suburbs, so she doesn't see them as often, but when she does it's memorable. 

She still has scars on her leg from that one time with Olivia, the goat, and her skirt. And it was her favorite skirt. She had been in favor of letting nature take its savage course, but the screaming had really gotten on her nerves. 

Her cousins are all, to a fault, female. She doesn't know what it is about the Balatnikov genes that rejects the y, but there it is. 

Due to a generational shift, they are all younger than ten, each comes in a sibling group of at least four, and that high pitched screaming that little girls do in large groups? 

They do it all the time. 

She feels sorry for their future nieces. Her cousins are tiny aunts in training. 

Jupiter actually does like her cousins. One at a time, maybe, and when they've been sedated. 

Jupiter was raised to be kind, or at least polite, and to get her own. She thinks her cousins are being raised to be little princesses in tutus and tiaras. 

And she knows what happens to princesses.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh god more cousins. I'm sorry. 
> 
> This time there's some plot. Yes, let's have some plot. Also, Caine teaches tiny!cousins to properly do a cat eye flick.
> 
> I'm still disappointed that I misheard the name of the capital city- I thought it was Ouroubouros, which is much better than Ores. Boring, Wachowskis!

She brings him over for dinner, next. She even lets him wear a tie. Jupiter takes the precaution of having him bring wine and vodka. Her aunts exclaim over his generosity and fawn over him. 

Nino does like hugging him. Sometimes Jupiter hates being right. 

They are sitting outside on the tiny strip of grass between the house and the sidewalk. Aunt Irina is smoking and exclaiming about how she hasn’t seen Galina in so long. The day has been pleasantly sunny. Jupiter had caught glimpses of it through windows and windshields all day when she was working. She lifts her face to the sun and closes her eyes. She finds the sounds of aunts squabbling soothing. She used to fall asleep to it when she was small.

As the minivan pulls to the driveway and the side door slides open Jupiter has to suppress a shudder. It’s a learned behavior.

Galina brings her daughters, three of the most hardened specimens of cousins Jupiter has. Galina is probably her favorite. They’ve grown apart in the last few years, though. She’s a little older than Jupiter, and lives in the suburbs. Galina drives a minivan and likes to ask Jupiter when she’s going to have kids. Jupiter used to follow her around adoringly when they were younger, so she tries not to hold it against her. 

Her cousins tiny feet thud on the ground like artillery shot. Despairingly, she sees they have brought their fairy wands. 

Galina makes the rounds hugging. She nicely glares at Irina until she gets the point and extinguishes her cigarette. Although this gives her the excuse to pour herself more vodka, Jupiter calls it even so far as health concerns.

Yevgeniy comes outside and asks if they want to play portal. The oldest, Lidochka, agrees and runs back inside. This is likely as much sunshine as Yevgeniy has had all day. The two youngest are currently climbing Caine like a tree. He lifts them up, hanging on to each arm upside down like bats, and pretends to be godzilla.

Jupiter knows watching Godzilla with him would be worth it eventually. 

Agafya, horrifyingly, makes rassolnik, but to make up for it also makes meatloaf. Jupiter suspects that there are kidneys in there, but Agafya usually fries it in bacon fat first so she still eats it. Her cousins make a game of painting Caine’s fingernails and asking how his cheekbones are so pointy. 

This gives Jupiter more reasons to keep drinking and eat more meatloaf. Her aunts squabble, her cousins run and scream. Caine pretends not to notice them tying his shoelaces together. He makes a big fuss when he stands up and tries to walk. Her cousins squawk delightedly. Her mother even smiles. 

It’s probably the happiest Jupiter’s been. 

Jupiter clears the table. Agafya makes coffee. They settle in the living room, Lidochka and Yevgeniy starting a game again. Jupiter passes out coffee and tea. She sits next to her mother and Aunt Nino on the couch, sipping vodka and gossiping. Jupiter leans into her mother’s warm weight, her mother’s arm coming around her shoulders. 

The two youngest break out their makeup bag, cornering Caine. He makes a s how of surrendering before sitting down crosslegged on the floor. He teaches them how to make a cat eye, and even submits to blue eyeshadow. Jupiter wonders at his tolerance for small girls, and thinks maybe she should rescue him But he seems happy enough. 

She thinks, slowly because of the vodka, that maybe that’s been her life until now. Just happy enough. Never really happy. She keeps getting flashes- tiny islands here and there. The satisfaction from a well cleaned kitchen. Caine looking at her. Her mother’s arm around her. But she is still not really happy. 

Jupiter would like that to change. But she’s still not quite sure how.

 

One morning, she gets a message from Kalique.

Caine tilts his head. He gets this way sometimes. Jupiter thinks he listening to mice in the walls again, so at first she doesn't pay attention. 

She's reading a newspaper, at their tiny kitchen table next to the window. He reaches over, lifts the window open. Cold air gusts in. The bot swoops through, a tiny globe with gossamer wings. Caine's eyes don't flicker, so Jupiter relaxes. He closes the window again with a grunt. Her eyes track the play of muscles in his arm, helplessly, and smiles. 

The bot unfolds impossibly larger into a view screen. It bobs respectfully, hovering over her morning cup of coffee. SECOND PRIMARY KALIQUE REQUESTS THE HONOR OF YOUR ATTENTION scrolls across the screen in green letters, then in Cyrillic.

She thinks back to the last conversation she had with Kalique. What she should have said, what she should have done. Her fingers hover over the play message. She wonders what Kalique wants to say, what she will mean, the broken glass behind the words. 

All you have to do is close your eyes. 

To what, she hadn't known. Now, she thinks she does. 

To garment workers in Bangladesh, to coal miners in West Virginia. Eternal youth, bottled and for sale. Cures for cancer, made from dead children. 

The world has always been a pyramid. A pyramid with a king slowly rotting inside, and blood in the mortar. Now she's found out the universe is the same. 

Jupiter still doesn't know what to do about it. 

She taps the message. Kalique looks flatly at her, wearing purple and blue, a headdress with pink feathers gently swaying behind her hair. "Jupiter, I have just been made aware of the circumstances surrounding your escape to Earth. While I regret that your life was threatened-" here Jupiter realizes that Caine is suddenly tense at the other side of the table, his shoulders unmoving and set, "I am unable to let any insult to my family rest. I am formally notifying you of my family's declaration of war against you and your people-"

Jupiter's eyes track with alarm to Caine. He has relaxed, his shoulders down again as he has resumed putting jelly on a piece of toast. She pauses the video to shriek at him. "What is this?"

He puts more jelly on his toast. "Your Majesty may not be aware, but wars have been waged very differently among the aristocracy in recent millennia. To declare war is a pretext." He gestures toward the bot with his knife. "The next words out of that Entitled's mouth will be about meeting somewhere, or a board decision, or about her respectfully petitioning the Aegis to burn your cities to the ground."' On catching her expression, he amends hastily, "Which they are unlikely to do."

"Unlikely? But not impossible." 

He shrugs. 

Jupiter plays the rest of the message. She has to go back to Ores for a hearing, more's the pity, in order to determine her degree of culpability in the destruction of the installation, Balem's death, and therefore the rightness of Kalique's declaration of war. And whether the Aegis can thermonuclear bomb her cities to ashes. 

"Holy crap." Jupiter sighs. "More space bureaucracy."


End file.
